“I am a man on a mission. A vocation, call it, to remake the past, a wish to fashion all that has been into being and becoming.”

So says Zamani, the enigmatic and erudite lodger in Abednego and Agnes Mlambo’s home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Bukhosi, the Mlambo’s teenage son, has gone missing, and his parents fear the worst—and most likely—possibility: that he has been disappeared by the state police. Zamani, preternaturally helpful and almost a part of the family, seems to be the Mlambos’ last, best hope of finding their son. But almost isn't quite enough for Zamani. As he cajoles, coaxes and coerces his hosts into revealing their sometimes tender, sometimes brutal life stories, Zamani steeps himself in borrowed family history, keenly aware that the one who controls the narrative will inherit the future.

Spanning fifty tumultuous years in southern Africa, House of Stone is a deeply smart, wildly inventive and often darkly humorous novel about cuckoos in the family nest and the murderous need to belong. Bursting with wit, rage and seduction, the prodigiously talented Novuyo Rosa Tshuma prosecutes the past and celebrates those on the wrong side of history in this mad and glorious epic about the death of colonial Rhodesia and the bloody birth of modern Zimbabwe.